Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Review: Go Go Loser Ranger

Spare a thought for the lowly mooks

Please allow me a bit of ancient history: remember D&D 4e? Maybe one day I'll write at length about D&D 4e and all the features that disappointed me about it. But one of the most salient to me, that has always bothered me in a particularly nagging way, is the rule that minion-type monsters have only 1 hit point. The problem is not just the effect in terms of game mechanics; in this kind of game, the numbers tell a story, and what this number tells the players is that mowing through hordes of minions is a mere formality, a filler scene before facing the boss monster. This rule is a sign that the 4e designers believed, and were very confident that the players shared that same belief, that minions don't really matter to the story. Translating the numbers into narrative themes exposes that, in the universe of 4e (and, frustratingly, in many other games), minions are not people. They are, to borrow a very apt turn of phrase, piñatas full of experience points.

The animated series Go Go Loser Ranger is a clever critique of this narrative convention. As tradition has it, the big bad boss of a typical Power Rangers episode is assisted by a handful of nameless henchmen who keep the heroes occupied while the actual evil plan proceeds. Both in dialogue and in choreography, these henchmen are treated as a temporary nuisance, as one would a swarm of mosquitoes. No one raises questions about how the villain acquired this army, why they agreed to fight for their side, and what kind of lives they have when they're not fighting. Their role in the story is to be killed with sparkling colors. They lack every attribute of personhood: they're interchangeable, disposable, unmournable, tyrannized by their own bosses, and excluded from the humanitarian limitations to warfare, sometimes by means of explicit, literal dehumanization. Once again I must quote N. K. Jemisin's great essay about orcs in fantasy:

Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.

Go Go Loser Ranger asks: who are these supposedly unimportant fighters that generation after generation of Power Rangers have been dispatching without a care? Do they have an inner life? Do they have aspirations? Do they want something more than being cannon fodder? Do they make friends? Do they have their own moral compass? Do they ever get to disobey orders? Do they weep when their teammates die? And also: what does our enjoyment of their slaughter say about us? Because it's one thing to vicariously savor the defeat of a boss monster with openly evil intentions; it's another to ignore the dozens of dead minions who most likely weren't in the villain's army by choice. To make this shift in perspective even more pointed, Go Go Loser Ranger quickly reveals that this version of the Power Rangers actually killed the villains years ago; the fights that still occur every weekend are just for show. With the bosses gone, the minions are now the slaves of the Power Rangers, forced to reenact their defeat on camera, again and again, for the amusement of the masses, who remain unaware that the war is over.

Comparison to The Boys comes readily to mind. The heroes have become narcissistic, short-tempered sociopaths. Staged battles sell thousands of tickets. Human society has been fully reorganized around the alleged threat of alien invasion. Children are not too subtly indoctrinated to worship a farce. As in The Boys, the superheroes in Go Go Loser Ranger demonstrate to what extent (super)power corrupts.

Our point-of-view character is D, one of the minions left over from the aliens' failed attempt to invade Earth. Like his teammates, he's demoralized by the interminable humiliation of having to pretend to fight and pretend to be destroyed, rinse and repeat every weekend. Unlike his teammates, one day he decides he's had enough of this cruel game, and forms a plan to eliminate the Power Rangers for real. He escapes the floating fortress where his kind have been kept confined, and infiltrates one of the junior combat schools where future Rangers are trained. As it turns out, these minions are shapeshifters, which is how they come up with a different Monster of the Week for each staged fight. Disguised as a human, D sees for himself the cutthroat dynamic that pervades all things Ranger. He ends up involved in more secret schemes than he was prepared for, and he discovers that he has to adapt quickly to survive the web of alliances and betrayals he's fallen into.

Besides the usual comedy that happens each time a monster tries to learn to act human, D also gets a chance to reevaluate the cause his bosses always ordered him to fight for, and realizes that minions are just as much beneath empathy in the eyes of humans as in the eyes of his bosses. At the same time, in his assumed identity, he's started to make human friends at the combat school, and he has to deal with new and strange feelings of loyalty and responsibility that he wasn't created for. So D's emotional journey takes him to a place minions very rarely get to experience: the need to decide, for the first time, what he wants for himself.

Season 1 has just finished airing, and there's plenty more manga plot to adapt. D's mission to avenge his kind still has a long road to go, and he's only scratched the surface of the dirty secrets the Power Rangers are hiding. With a pleasantly watchable animation style, catchy music, a careful dosing of mysteries and revelations, and a pitch-perfect sense of comedy, Go Go Loser Ranger is not only surprisingly thought-provoking, but also greatly entertaining.


Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.


POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.